1. Field
This application relates to cyber security and cyber warfare.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
The internet was created as a “dumb network” with “intelligent devices” and as such traffic that flows through is treated as equal. The design of the internet is one reason attacks are so prevalent today. Today's systems are not designed to implement counter measures against cyber-attacks. Current cyber-security programs provide protections rather than the ability to fight back against attackers; which is very different from cyber security programs such as anti-virus and anti-malware programs and internet security programs, which are protection- and prevention-based. There is not one single system that allows for full protection of a network either private or public. While most systems today are defensive and reactive in nature and must rely on known issues to protect against such attacks, they must also implement multiple defenses as not one system solves all these problems. Dropped packets are a source of critical concern in defending one's network due to technology and speed limitations.
Major limitations in filtering traffic exist as well as the ability to attribute an attack(s). Other limitations are due to the fact that most software protection is not based on behavioral information but rather on known signatures. Whereas a blended solution of signature and behavior would be advantageous. Additionally, most current approaches to network forensics processing (programs like SNORT®) were designed when multi-core machines were not available to the general computing community. Multi-cores can run multiple instructions at the same time. Software needed to be open to parallel computing to take advantage of this. The performance gained depends heavily on software algorithms used. Parallelization of software has been problematic for developers. Therefore, as with most software that was migrated to multi core computers, the software simply shared the processing, but the disadvantage of a multi core system trying to share the same memory bus was never truly understood.